> Unfortunately, as some of you might have heard "Change the World" aka "Give
> a School" aka "Give 100, Give 1000" will cease to exist. We are just waiting
> for the info to be taken off the main website (any second now).
>
> We are doing this in an effort to refocus back to large-scale deployments
> that create change in a major way. We WILL honor all requests that we have
> received prior to the info being taken off the website. So if you know
> anyone who is interested, tell them time is of the essence!!

Give 100 or more laptops with this special program that allows donors to choose the country where the laptops go. This geo-targeted program can impact a village, a region, or even a country, with large group donations.

I’m speculating that the minimum deployment is back up to 10,000 XOs, which was a previous category of deployment.

This is a blow to future small deployments in South Africa, as we have over 600 XOs deployed in South Africa through this program with more that were planned. Marco Rosa has been setting up a local non-profit organisation to raise funds and coordinate deployments – now to no effect unless we use laptops from other vendors.

Now I’ll get back to making Sugar, the learning platform originally developed for the OLPC XO, work on other hardware via Ubuntu…

[The following was largely written by members of the Sugar Labs marketing team.]

[UPDATE: Collabora also provide engineering resources.]

The recent layoffs of almost the entire OLPC software development team have been widely circulated, but not the implications for Sugar, the learning platform originally developed specifically for the OLPC XO but now available on various GNU/Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora.

For about 3 months now, Sugar Labs has already been taking care of Sugar development with almost no support from OLPC (other than contracting the core development team until recently).

Sugar has not lost any of its full-time core developers as a consequence of OLPC’s layoffs: All of the core team will stay around as unpaid volunteers while we’re looking for new ways to finance their full-time contribution.

Today, development of Sugar and activities relies upon 20 active contributors.

Over the past few months, we have grown our community with new contributors, new partners and new distributors.

The rate of development seems to be increasing steadily as we consolidate our new community driven development model (we can obtain some support evidence from git).

Through the Software Freedom Conservancy, Sugar Labs is receiving some very generous support (although we’re not yet able to credit individual donors).

While we do not plan to hire a development team within Sugar Labs, we’re working to get some of our full-time volunteer contributors sponsored by external organizations.

Red Hat, Collabora and Solution Grove are contributing with engineering resources and covering traveling expenses for some of our members.

The development cycle is proceeding steadily and Sucrose 0.84 will be released as planned in March.

We’ve been working to establish Local Labs, grassroots organizations which, in our mind, will fill up the gap left by OLPC in deployments.

It’s starting to become clear that 0.84 is where we’ll prove our credibility as a self-sufficient, community-driven project.

My contract with OLPC hasn’t been renewed due to financial reasons. I’ve added myself to the rather obscure Professional Services Sugar Labs page – look for more of us to appear there in the near future, as almost all the Sugar developers are in a similar position.

We either need funding, or a way to provide contract services developing and supporting Sugar.

sugar-jhbuild has moved over as well, and updated to use the new repos. Some of the module names have been changed at the same time, for example presence-service is now sugar-presence-service, and chat-activity is now just chat.

If you’re using sugar-jhbuild, the old repo is up to date as of now with the new repos, but I recommend a completely clean build, cloned from the new repo, unless you have the git-fu to change it in place.

Anyone who could commit/push to the old sugar-* repos is welcome to ask for commit rights on the new repos – we can’t add you until you register on git.sugarlabs.org. In the mean time, it’s trivial to clone a personal repo in the git.sugarlabs.org web interface and push to that and request a merge.

One Laptop Per Child resumed the Give 1 Get 1 program on Monday, via Amazon, available in the USA and 30 countries in Europe. USA orders can be shipped overnight, so buyers get the XOs much faster than last year. You pay $399, get an XO, and help fund OLPC deployments in developing countries – see where the laptops from last year’s G1G1 went.

There are videos on OLPC’s Youtube channel, introducing the XO laptop, OLPC’s mission and how the laptops are used for education.

The XO laptop runs Sugar, a platform and user interface designed for learning. You can run Sugar on various GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora.

You can also run a conventional GNU/Linux distribution on the XO, either by installing onto the built-in NAND flash storage, or from a USB drive or SD card – including Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora. Amazon also lists Fedora 10 preinstalled on an SD card as a companion product to the XO (for preorder before F-10 is released). You do need a developer key, but then you can simply insert the SD card and boot Fedora without needing to install anything.